"How is Major Clowes? Did he have a good night and was he in a— was he cheerful today?"
"So-so: he's not a great talker, is he?"
Isabel's speaking face expressed dissent. "Perhaps not when he's in a good temper. Oh, I'm so sorry, I'm always forgetting he's your cousin."
"I'm prone to forget it myself. I've seen so little of him."
"('Though the blase-man-of-the-world had seen thousands of superbly beautiful women in elegant creations by Paquin or Worth, his gaze was riveted as by a mesmeric attraction on the innocent young girl in her simple little white muslin frock, with her lissome ankles and slim, sunburnt hands.') Laura said you had been a great traveller. Shall you settle down in England?"
"Not unless I marry."
Isabel declined this topic, on which Mrs. Jack Bendish would have expatiated. "Laura says you have a lovely old house in Somersetshire. It must be jolly to have an ancestral house."
"Mine is not ancestral," said Lawrence amused. "My father bought it forty years ago at the time of the agricultural depression. It belonged to some county people—Sir Frank Fleet—who couldn't afford to keep it up. It is a lovely place, Farringay, but it's full of Fleet ghosts and the neighbourhood doesn't let me forget that I'm an alien."
"But how absurd! how narrow-minded!" exclaimed Isabel. "Houses must change hands now and then, and I dare say your father was a better landlord than the Fleets were. Besides, see how much worse it might have been! There's Wilmerdings, here in Chilmark, that the Morleys have taken: his name isn't Morley at all, Yvonne says it's Moss in the City: but they foreclosed on the Orr-Matthews' mortgage and turned them out, and that darling old place is delivered over to a horrid little Jew!"
"Poor Morley!" said Lawrence laughing. "I am a Jew myself." Isabel was stricken dumb. "I thought I had better tell you than let you hear it from some one else. No, don't apologize! these things will happen, and I'm not deeply hurt, for I refuse to call sibb with a Moss-Morley. I should never foreclose on any one's mortgage. My mother was an Englishwoman and my father was a Levantine—half Jew, half Greek. Have you never heard of Andrew Hyde the big curio dealer in New Bond Street? He was commonly known as old Hyde-and-seek. The Hyde galleries are famous. As I remember him he was a common-looking little old man with a passion for art."